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Hi again 'Scapers
Over the past few months, we’ve been running a series of betas to give you hands-on access to our planned Combat Modernisation update. Each beta has helped us gather your feedback, make meaningful changes, and significantly improve Combat Modernisation with every iteration.
The Combat Modernisation update was originally scheduled to release next week, but we have decided that, to make sure it launches with the quality you expect, we want to extend our beta tests by one week. This means that the Combat Modernisation update will now launch on the 2nd of March and not on the 23rd of February.
We believe an additional week will capture the majority of remaining feedback, while avoiding a cycle of endless testing that results in the update becoming vapourware.
What are we testing during this current week and what will we use the extra week for?
The beta has progressed well, and your feedback has been invaluable in shaping where you want combat to go. This iteration strengthens each style and addresses key concerns you've raised.
It's clear from your feedback that zero adrenaline abilities didn't quite fit, partially due to the lack of visual feedback from the adrenaline bar staying static, this issue was compounded by the number of zero-adrenaline abilities available, so we're moving a number of abilities out of this bracket and back into 'basics' or 'spenders' but keeping zero costs for a few key abilities that make sense.
As part of this upcoming update, Attack, Strength, Ranged, and Magic are being raised to level 120, and we’re planning to add new perks to the 120 skill capes. We’ve been exploring a few ideas, things like QoL-style perks similar to Necromancy, Archaeology, or Thieving capes, or even extensions of the current 99 cape perks, but nothing’s locked in just yet.
So we want to hear from combat-focused players about what you’d actually like to see from these cape effects. One thing we’re really keen to avoid is adding anything that feels mandatory, we don’t want it to shift from “this is a nice bonus” to “I can’t do combat properly until I hit 120.”
Share your ideas for these skill cape perks over on Discord and in the Reddit threads, we’d love to hear what you come up with!
It's worth noting that whilst this beta, pending your feedback, largely represents the majority of the Combat Styles Improvements release, there are still further improvements we want to make, and more importantly that you want to see. Some of these, particularly those that clearly need addressing (e.g. Blast diffusion boots need a new effect), will be in next week's beta.
To get ahead of the questions, here is a list of some of the changes not in this current beta iteration that we will be addressing, or are currently Work-in-progress.
Even beyond the beta, we'll be continuing to improve combat and, of course, addressing your feedback, whether that is system improvements, visual improvements, or directly combat improvements.
Melee previously has always had a bit of an identity issue. However we think the addition of Bloodlust and rebalancing in the last beta has lined it up nicely.
Melee is a self-sufficient style that wins through raw numbers. Its abilities are simply stronger than their counterparts in other styles. Whether thats generating more adrenaline, dealing higher base damage, or offering built-in bonus effects. This extra value offsets its core weakness: being forced into close range, and we think this fits the style well!
Following the last beta, we understand that while you liked the idea of Bloodlust, its execution left some room for improvement. As a result, we've made some changes across the board to make it feel more responsive and more impactful to consume.
Bloodlust now generates from basic abilities, while Rend (formerly Pressing Blow) generates 2 stacks.
This allows for increased choice throughout the fight; reducing the feeling of 'wasting' a global cooldown on a basic attack, when you could be empowering a better ability.
We're further leaning into the power fantasy of a berserker here, ensuring that stacks are generated frequently enough to impact your gameplay, while offering adequate choice.
A lot of bloodlust effects felt like they had application in the late game through minor effects like critical chance, but it left them feeling unimpactful in the early game. As a result we're swapping the assault effect to something that has early application with some niche use cases late game, and also gives melee some much-needed sustain.
Flurry was odd. On paper Berserk reduction sounds good, but in reality it often did nothing as players wanted to wait for other important buffs to line up. We're moving the effect over to something a little more useful.
Slaughter was lacking in damage slightly, given the removal of its 3x walk. While bleeds are unaffected by Berserk, we've increased its base damage to match live, plus given it a little extra to account for Berserk's changes last beta.
"We want this to sit slightly differently as a longer duration bleed: Something that you situationally use during longer encounters. We've increased its overall hit count allowing it to scale slightly better with the Masterwork Spear of Annihilation, and allow you to benefit from bleed boosting effects for longer."
With the introduction of the Hurricane cooldown reduction and some changes to bloodlust, we feel that Melee has enough AoE within Adaptive Strike, Hurricane, Flurry and Meteor Strike. As a result, we've re-removed Quake. We understand the concerns with early game accuracy, which we'll be tackling separately.
Magic at its core has a lot of utility and a lot of AoE potential. Late game the style develops and opens up options to build around critical strikes; with natural payoffs for more damage, and built-in payoffs to start spamming big abilities, but it also has a sub-theme forming, focussing on the opposite, damage over time, big value abilities.
We're happy with where Magic sits, the AoE, utility, and build focus gives it clear purpose and ways to progress the style.
Following the removal of Metamorphosis and re-tiering of Combust from basic, players building around Song of Destruction (Roar of Awakening's set effect) had lost a fair bit of power. So we're making some adjustments aimed at improving Magic as a whole, but with specific sights on the burn-build.
Combust was key to the burn build, so we're returning its basic status, but we're keeping it deliberately powerful and extending its total lifetime to allow more Dragon Breath casts whilst it's active and tweaking how certain effects interact with it.
Last week we tried out a replacement for wrack and ruin in the form of Sanguine Charge; costing HP for reduced Runic Charge cooldown, while we think this was neat, we could see players getting confused around its effectiveness, as well as struggling with a HP cost added to their standard use spell.
Ultimately we think simplicity is best here, we don't think it was needed from a spell that gives a sizeable damage buff, so we're pocketing it for now.
In case you've not been keeping up to date with the beta progress, Ranged's style at its core excels at multi-hitting, peppering enemies with multiple small shots at a time, but getting big payoffs for doing so.
We're happy with how ranged feels on the beta, our changes here aim to just make that feel even better by making certain abilities feel better to use.
Imbue gales seemed to be a nice addition to range adding some built-in payoff for multihits. However you noted how much time the player spends not attacking and instead activating buffs, so we're moving it from a pure self buff ability to a single hit basic that applies the same effect.
"Big explosion good."
RuneScape rangers are a little more 'assassin-mobile vehicles of death', than the stand still and aim types. So we're making Rapid Fire have the old fleeting boots effect by default, to embed mobility a little more into the style. (Don't worry we will be updating fleetings to get a different effect)
Functionally chinchompas worked pretty much identically to decimation which didn't really make sense for them, we're making chins' align more with their explosive nature, splashing enemies nearby in a fiery inferno (and bits of rodent), while making decimation a little better at hitting targets that are away from each other.
With all the ability changes over the beta, some perks either fell short of their original power, or lost their associated abilities all together, so we're changing them to line them back up with where we think they should sit, additionally we're reducing the gap between rank 1 and rank 4 for these perks so not hitting a perfect perk feels a little less bad.
Energising has never really had much of a use case, so we're pushing for it to be more applicable in the mid-game by changing up its effect.
Caroming's old effect has been moved into the greater versions of the respective abilities, so we're switching up the effect
Ready to give the Beta a try? Here’s how:
On first login, your live save is imported into the Beta. You can re-import your save into the Beta once per hour.
Please note that this is a Beta, so not everything shown is guaranteed to make it into the live game. We’ll be working closely with players to refine these updates and bring them to the live game once they’re fully ready!